Fifty Shades of Black (17 page)

 

 

Tainted Money

Y
ou planning to spend any time in Vietnam or Thailand? Here's a hint: don't take travellers' cheques. They are next to worthless. In fact, unless you're looking for kindling to start a fire they ARE worthless. I spent an entire morning in Ho Chi Minh City last year going from bank to hotel to money-changer trying to cash an American Express traveller's cheque for a hundred dollars. They treated me like I was trying to palm off some satanic manifesto about the perfidies of Uncle Ho. Peeved, I unfolded my emergency fifty dollar US bill that I kept hidden behind my driver's licence and handed it to the teller at the last bank I tried. The teller took it suspiciously, squinted at it, then handed it back with a shake of her head.

What? They don't take American currency? When I persisted, she pointed to a check mark someone had made with a ballpoint pen right next to President Grant's portrait.

“Not take,” she said firmly. “Dirty money.”

Turns out that Asian banks—the ones I tried to deal with anyway—will only accept bills that are as unsullied and pristine as an Anne Murray lullaby. Corner missing? Sorry. Greasy, grimy or all crumpled up from being jammed in your sock? Too bad.

Weird. I've exchanged bills in Canadian banks that were so battered and mangled you couldn't tell if the lady on the front was Queen Elizabeth or Granny Clampett. As long as the serial numbers were intact, those bills were accepted without question.

But . . . perhaps not so weird. Scientists have been putting currency under the microscope recently and it turns out that our money really is dirty. Sometimes spectacularly so.

In a study published in the
Southern Medical Journal
experts pulled sixty-eight US one-dollar bills out of public circulation and tested them for contamination. A total of 94 percent of them failed to pass the test. True, most of them were merely crawling with “friendly” bacteria not dangerous to human health, but nearly 10 percent harboured potentially fatal pathogens including pneumonia, staphylococcus and the fecal bacteria E. coli.

And then there's the cocaine factor. In 2009 a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts tested over two hundred bills of various denominations collected from eighteen US cities. Some 90 percent of them showed traces of cocaine. Clearly, the ability of money to serve as a delivery system for unwanted substances is beyond doubt.

Makes sense when you think about it. Paper money sees a lot of life as it gets passed around through the sweaty hands of taxi drivers, bartenders, convenience store operators . . . who knows who's handled the money in your wallet? Who can tell if some of those bills you accept from the nice lady at the flower shop have been seeing active duty as a straw up some cokehead's nose or as a gratuity stuffed down a stripper's G-string?

Mind you, the odds in favour of clean (well, clean-ish) are better here in Canada. We don't have scuzzy one-dollar—or even two-dollar—bills in circulation anymore. We've replaced them with cold metal loonies and toonies that are much less hospitable to bacteria and viruses.

As for paper money, we've gotten rid of that, too. Our new bills are made of polymer, not paper. Not only are they harder to counterfeit, they're much more difficult to contaminate. Plastic is a poor host for those microscopic nasty critters that thrive on old-fashioned currency.

Mind you, those new Canadian bills may not be totally bug-free. A bank teller in Kelowna claims she's heard of an instance where several new hundred-dollar bills left in a car on a sweltering August afternoon melted and fused together.

Try cashing a blob of polymer at any bank—Vietnamese or Canadian.

Dirty money. Gives a whole new interpretation to the term “money laundering.”

Mark Twain and an acquaintance were once shooting the breeze and the topic turned to a very rich man they both knew.

“Of course,” the acquaintance sniffed, “his money is tainted.”

“Yep,” said Twain. “T'ain't yours and t'ain't mine.”

 

 

A Sign of the Times

There are limits to man's wisdom, but no limits on his stupidity—and that's just not fair.

—Konrad Adenauer

S
ometimes I despair of our courts. One guy draws six months in the slammer for knocking over a convenience store for chump change; meanwhile British Columbia chiseller Ian Thow, who bilked pensioners and small-time investors out of millions of dollars, gets a powder-puff pat on the wrist and may well be back on the street by the time you read this.

“The law,” Charles Dickens has one of his characters opine, “is an ass . . . an idiot.”

Often true—but not always. Consider the case of the judge in Cleveland, Ohio, who pronounced judgment on Shena Hardin recently. Ms. Hardin had been caught on camera driving her car up on a sidewalk to get around a school bus that was discharging children. Her sentence? Neither fine nor jail time. She merely has to stand at a major intersection for two school days wearing a sign around her neck that says: ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD DRIVE ON THE SIDEWALK TO AVOID A SCHOOL BUS.

As a punishment, that has a nice ring to it. As a matter of fact it has a kind of universality that might well lend itself to other cases.

Republican congressman Paul Broun of Georgia, for example. Congressman Broun recently cast doubt on the theories of evolution, embryology and the big bang theory, dismissing them as “lies from the pit of hell.” The earth is only nine thousand years old, the congressman assured anyone who would listen, and anyone who disagreed with him was consigned to everlasting damnation.

It is somewhat dismaying to learn that Congressman Broun is a member of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, but I think that would be negated nicely if he was required to wear a sign around his neck saying: I AM AN IDIOT.

And although he's no longer in a position to wear the sign, Edward Archibald of West Palm Beach would certainly qualify on behavioural grounds. Mr. Archibald recently won a bug-eating contest in his hometown by cramming wriggling worms, chirping crickets and live, three- to four-inch-long cockroaches into his mouth and swallowing them faster than any of the other twenty-nine contestants.

Alas, Mr. Archibald didn't get to enjoy first prize (a live python); he collapsed and died right after downing his last insect.

Although Mr. Archibald can't wear the sign around his neck, perhaps a placard declaring HE WAS AN IDIOT could be propped against his tombstone.

Idiot signs—it's a growth industry when you think about it. Consider: this past Halloween, Americans spent $370 million on Halloween costumes—for their pets.
Time
magazine says 15 percent of the population shelled out serious money to outfit their Chihuahuas and tortoiseshells in costumes ranging from Batman to Lady Gaga—that's forty-five million more idiot signs right there!

And as long as we're handing out awards how about a Lifetime Achievement I'M STILL AN IDIOT sign for Donald Trump? The bouffant-ed blowhard buffoon outdid himself during the last presidential election campaign, texting and tweeting paranoid and delusional denunciations of the US president. NBC anchorman Brian Williams nicely encapsulated the New York nutbar's contributions, saying that Trump had “driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something closer to irresponsible.” Trump, meanwhile, was punching out tweets such as “Let's fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us!”

No, Donald. Only at you.

But we need to save one sign for a radio listener named Donna—mercifully we don't know her last name—who recently phoned up a radio open-line show in North Dakota to complain about the placement of “Deer Crossing” signs on busy roads.

Donna felt that the signs were hazardous and that the deer should be directed to cross roads in less travelled areas.

The radio show host assured her that actually . . . the signs weren't meant for the deer to read.

“I feel so stupid,” said Donna. “I had no clue that these signs were for us.”

 

 

Bubble-Wrap the Kiddies

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Mark Twain

N
ews alert, folks—the Department of Education has just announced a ban on Christmas trees in schools. “Too many prickles,” a spokesman said. “A child could choke on a pine or spruce needle and possibly die.”

Nah, I'm joshing ya—but only just. Big Nurse is on the loose and she's determined to protect the little ones, even if it means you go to jail.

Ask the ladies who were enjoying doughnuts and coffee on a bench in one of New York City's public playgrounds last spring. Busted! The cops who gave them tickets also took down a notorious ring of seven senior male citizens operating inside the confines of yet another city playground. Their offence? Playing chess. Adults in New York are forbidden to even enter public playgrounds unless accompanied by a child.

Might be pedophiles, you know.

Several American libraries have caught the paranoia bug, banning unaccompanied adults from entering the children's book sections. There's one library in Pennsylvania that bans adults from using the restrooms “unless accompanied by their children.”

So it's verboten for a solo grandpa to go to the john but it's okay for a pedophile to take a kid in with him? I'm confused.

It's just as dopey on this side of the border. Last summer a bunch of teenagers got together to play a game of pickup baseball on the grounds of Eagle View Elementary School in Victoria, BC. Why not? It was summertime, there were no classes being held, the field was empty. That's when the bylaw officer came over and asked them if they had a permit. They didn't. He kicked them off the property.

Just how safe do we want our kids to be? Bubble-wrap safe. Parents of children attending an elementary school in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, recently received a letter informing them that henceforth students were not to bring pens or pencils onto school property in pockets, binders or backpacks. Writing utensils would be handed out by school officials, as necessary. Sixth-grade teacher Wendy Scott went on to say that if any student was caught with a pen or pencil, he or she would be assumed to have stolen it from school with the intent “to build weapons.”

Not that school kids need dangerous armament-building material like pencils and ballpoints to wreak havoc and destroy society as we know it. Alert teachers at a junior school in Bridlington, England, have ordered their students to stop raising their hands to answer questions. Head teacher Cheryl Adams explains that the tradition of hand-raising to respond to questions “creates too much excitement.”

“Some children put their hands up at every opportunity,” Adams says, “while others won't, even if they know the answers.”

But the Bridlington Brain Trust has a solution. They want students to respond by giving a “thumbs-up” instead.

(I hope they warn the kiddies not to try that in Australia, Argentina and especially in Iran, where a thumbs-up means a thumbs-up-yours.)

They also better not try it any schoolrooms in Ionia, Michigan. Schools there have a “zero tolerance policy.” Translated, that means they are politically correct to the point of insanity. A student by the name of Mason Jammer made the thumbs-up sign to a classmate in an Ionia public school recently. His teacher decided he was “imitating a revolver” and had him suspended and sent home. Mason Jammer is six years old.

Sad, sad, sad. I'm with author Ellen Gilchrist who said: “All you have to do to educate a child is to leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest is brainwashing.”

 

 

Watch Your Mouth!

Y
ou like it hot and sticky? Have I got a party place for you. Rent-free, for starters, plus a constant temperature of thirty-five degrees Celsius, 100 percent humidity—and all the food you can eat.

Not a bad gig—for a bacterium.

We're talking about your mouth and what's living in there. By the end of this missive you may never French kiss again. Even if you brush three times a day and cut your Johnny Walker with Listerine, you are a virtual slum landlord when it comes to your pie hole. You've got bacteria, fungi, protozoa and sundry viruses of no fixed address hanging out between your teeth, just under your gums, on your tongue—even on the roof of your mouth. The bad news is: you'll never get rid of them. The good news is: you really don't want to. Most of these wriggly critters are Good Guys. They'd be wearing Mountie stetsons if we made hat sizes that small. They toil away 24/7, hunting down and knocking off bad bacteria—when they're not nibbling on the bits of cheeseburger and corn dog stuck between our teeth.

Then there's the Bad Guys. Not a lot of them, really, but enough to ruin a neighbourhood. We call them the Strep Gang (full name
Streptococcus mutans
). The Strep Gang members used to be Good Guys but we got them hooked on drugs and now they've gone rogue. The drug that did them in? Refined sugar.

See, for most of our history we didn't have refined sugar—and had better teeth for it. Back in the old days, chemicals in our saliva routinely neutralized acids from raw sugar. But
Streptococcus mutans
goes ape for the new fancy-pants refined sugar—which it converts into acid that attacks tooth enamel and eventually produces those canyons, arroyos, wadis, coulees and black holes we call cavities.

The solution? Way less sugar of course—and good luck with that. The North American diet is saturated in refined sugars to the point of obscenity (check out the adulterated breakfast cereals aimed exclusively at kids—Sugar Frosted Flakes . . . Count Chocula . . . who needs that crap?).

Then of course there's candy. We have that annual sugar orgy called Halloween, in which kids vie with one another to see how many garbage bags of sweets they can amass—chocolate bars, toffee, peanut brittle, peppermints, butterscotch, licorice, jelly beans, jawbreakers, Life Savers, candy kisses, candy canes, bubble gum . . .

Oh, hold it on the gum. Turns out that gum is good for kids. In fact, it turns out gum is exactly what our candy-overdosing kids need.

I'm not making that up. A dental study in Finland way back in the 1980s revealed that kids who chewed gum had 60 percent fewer cavities than kids who didn't. A more recent study in Belize found even better numbers—70 percent fewer cavities among gum-chewing ten year olds. Not just any gum of course. It has to be sweetened with xylitol, a naturally occurring sweetener present in many fruits and vegetables.

Dental experts are now recommending that children
be encouraged
to chew gum in school, three times a day, starting in kindergarten.

Ironic. As a kid I got my knuckles whacked for chewing gum in school. If I were a student now, I'd be nailed for NOT chewing gum in school.

Ah well. As that eminent philosopher Alfred E. Neuman said: “We live in a world where lemonade is made from artificial flavours and furniture polish is made from real lemons.”

Now there's something to chew on.